One of the most interesting things about GenAI is that it tells us that language is not what we think it is, and that it does not have to be learnt using traditional grammar-based rules.

The fact that a machine can become fluent in any language simply by reading or watching a large enough amount of properly tagged content is entirely consistent with the way humans learn their native language.

But the fact that you can have excellent language skills without a spark of real intelligence (let alone sentience) has even deeper lessons for the world we live in.

Perhaps people who try to find consciousness or human intelligence in LLMs belong to the 65% of people who primarily use words in their thinking and suffer from some kind of projection, attributing thinking abilities to a talking machine?.

A recent paper talks specifically about this topic

Language is a dening characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking.

We begin by introducing the brain network that supports linguistic ability in humans. We then review evidence for a double dissociation between language and thought, and discuss several properties of language that suggest that it is optimized for communication.

We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.